PR and email marketing: A perfect alliance for business success

Public relations (PR) and email marketing are two core areas that contribute to the functioning of many businesses. While distinct in their approaches, these disciplines often intersect, engaging in a symbiotic relationship that amplifies brand messaging and engagement. 

This article explores the harmonious connection between PR and email marketing, showing how collaborations between specialists foster brand awareness, build relationships, and drive results in the modern marketing landscape. Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Public relations and email marketing: What are the differences?

Before diving into the ways PR and email marketing benefit not only each other but businesses, it is worth discussing them separately to elucidate their differences and areas of responsibility. As we explore their nuances, you might be surprised at how these two different specialties work harmoniously together.

Public relations and its main functions

PR is a strategic communication discipline that manages and shapes public perceptions of an organization, individual, or brand. 

It involves building and maintaining positive relationships with various stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, media outlets, influencers, and the public. PR specialists execute various PR approaches to make a business stand out from its competitors and to make a brand worth discussing.

Increasing brand recognition

PR is crucial in increasing brand recognition, allowing a brand to become more widely known and familiar to target market audiences. This involves building awareness of a brand and its offerings through media coverage, partnerships, sponsorships, events, etc. 

This ensures that a business stands out from the competition. Additionally, such efforts foster consumers’ positive opinions of a brand.

Enhancing brand reputation

Enhancing brand reputation involves managing and shaping individuals’ perceptions to establish a favorable image of a brand among target market segments. 

This is achieved through various strategies, such as authentic communication, positive media coverage, and endeavors to fulfill corporate social responsibilities. All such efforts aim to build trust, credibility, and goodwill among possible consumers.

Demonstrating a brand’s reputation and values is vital to its success, as 82% of consumers are more willing to engage with brands that align with their own.

Building relationships with influencers

Building relationships with influencers involves identifying, engaging, and collaborating with individuals with a significant and engaged following on social media platforms or other digital channels. 

Influencers include bloggers, vloggers, social media personalities, industry experts, and thought leaders who can help amplify a brand’s message and reach a wider audience.

Influencing public opinion

One of PR’s key functions is influencing public opinion. This involves shaping the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of the general public or specific target audiences toward an organization, individual, product, service, or issue. 

PR professionals use various strategies and tactics to influence public opinion, create a favorable brand image, or boost the reputation of a business and its services.

Establishing thought leadership

Thought leaders are key individuals within an organization who are experts and influential voices in their industry or niche. 

Thought leaders are recognized for their knowledge, insights, expertise, and innovative thinking, and they play a pivotal role in shaping industry trends, driving conversations, and influencing public opinion through their research, insights, social media presence, speaking engagements, and much more.

Attracting new leads

By leveraging different strategies and tactics, PR specialists generate interest, awareness, and engagement among potential customers or clients. 

While PR is traditionally associated with building relationships and managing reputation, it also significantly drives lead-generation efforts.

Handling and mitigating reputational risks and problems

Proactively addressing issues, managing crises, and protecting a brand’s reputation and credibility are vital to every business. 

PR professionals play a crucial role in identifying potential risks, implementing strategies to prevent or minimize the negative impacts of such risks, and responding effectively when reputational problems arise. 

Email marketing and its main functions

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that sends commercial messages to a business audience via email. These messages can take various forms, such as promotional emails, newsletters, announcements, reactivation messages, and event invitations. 

Email marketing is widely used by businesses of all sizes and industries to communicate with customers, prospects, or subscribers.

Increasing conversions and sales

The main goal of email marketing is to deliver impactful email campaigns that drive recipients to take desired actions, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or engaging with the brand. Email marketers use strategies, such as thorough segmentation, compelling content, and clear calls to action, to achieve the desired goals.

Improving customer retention

Improving customer retention rates is vital to every business’s performance, as acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than retaining existing ones. 

Email marketers are responsible for email campaigns that foster ongoing engagement, loyalty, and repeat purchases among existing customers. Regular communication, exclusive offers, and re-engagement campaigns are among some of the main tools email marketers use.

Expanding an email list for better outreach

Growing a subscriber base helps businesses reach wider audiences. 

Email marketers use various strategies, such as paid advertising, referral programs, events, webinars, and guest blogging, to expand their lists, enhance the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, and drive increased engagement, conversions, and revenue.

Building a connection with the audience

Fostering meaningful and authentic interactions with subscribers is vital to fostering trust, loyalty, and engagement.

Email marketers use a consistent brand voice, storytelling, personalization techniques, and responsive and regular communication to build and reinforce relationships between a business and its customers.

Delivering relevant and valuable content

Relevant content in emails is vital for keeping subscribers engaged and active. Email marketing specialists do their best to provide subscribers with content personalized to their interests, needs, and preferences and add genuine value to their lives.

Driving traffic to a brand’s website

Another main function of email marketing involves using email campaigns to encourage subscribers to visit specific pages or sections of a website. This traffic can turn into new leads, blog readers, and a loyal audience recommending the business to others.

Measuring and optimizing newsletters

It is vital to evaluate the performance of every email marketing campaign to keep them on the right course. 

This involves tracking key metrics (open rates, click-through rates, subscriptions, and so on), analyzing performance data, making informed adjustments, and conducting thorough A/B testing of new changes to improve the effectiveness of email campaigns.

How public relations and email marketing complement each other

Now that we’ve established the differences between PR and email marketing, we demonstrate how they can significantly amplify businesses’ success. 

According to recent studies, 90% of PR specialists prefer sending pitches via 1:1 emails—which already involves cooperation between PR and email marketing. However, let’s dive further into the subject since these two marketing approaches engage in much deeper forms of cooperation.

Outreach

This is the first and foremost topic that comes to mind when considering the interaction between email marketing and PR. 

PR specialists primarily use emails to reach brands, influencers, industry experts, journalists, and platforms to pitch PR ideas or promote a brand, product, or message. 

Outreach aims to build relationships, generate media coverage, and enhance brand visibility and reputation. PR specialists generate ideas, while email marketers send them to the right destination—plain and simple.

Shared content plans

A shared content plan helps email marketing and PR specialists cooperate effectively by aligning their efforts, messaging, and goals to create a cohesive and integrated communication strategy.

It also allows specialists to avoid content duplication, as plans help marketing specialists get on the same page and know exactly what the other has created and shared with the public.

A shared content plan is also an excellent tool for optimizing the marketing efforts of both PR and email marketing units, as each can adapt the content created for different platforms and promotional channels.

Cross-posting

Cross-posting is the common practice of sharing the same content or message across multiple platforms or channels simultaneously or sequentially. Regarding PR and email marketing cooperation, cross-posting involves sharing content or announcements generated through PR efforts across email marketing channels and vice versa.

However, this strategy requires a thorough approach. For example, each piece of information to be cross-posted needs to be reviewed for its appropriateness for the specific channel, meaning length, format, hashtags, overall style, and many other factors. 

Additionally, it’s vital to avoid cross-posting the same content across all channels on every platform, as audiences might perceive such repetition to be lazy marketing and subscribers might get annoyed. 

Therefore, it is important that specialists review every post, adapt the content, and rework it, delivering only the essence of the content.

Brand awareness

PR is vital in expanding a brand’s reach and creating excitement around products or services. PR can effectively increase brand visibility and credibility by securing features in relevant media outlets, blogs, and podcasts that resonate with a brand’s target audience. 

Once potential customers’ attention has been captured through PR efforts, email marketing becomes a vital tool for nurturing leads and guiding them toward conversion.

Following up on PR placements with strategic email campaigns allows marketers to engage with the audience more personally, offering them valuable content, exclusive deals, or incentives to join a brand’s email list.

Customer retention

In brand management, PR specialists are critical in maintaining a positive reputation and managing crises effectively. Meanwhile, email marketing is a powerful tool for enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering loyalty. 

PR specialists aim to ensure transparent communication with the audience during crises, while email marketing provides practical solutions and support. 

Beyond crisis management, email marketing enables personalized communication with customers. Brands can send quick thank-you notes, rewards, birthday wishes with discounts, and feedback requests. 

Together, PR and email marketing work to uphold a brand’s reputation, nurture customer relationships, and drive its long-term success. It’s a win–win partnership that leads to retained customers. 

Content creation

Leveraging the strengths of both PR and email marketing can significantly enhance a business’s content strategy. PR specialists excel at producing valuable assets that resonate with audiences, such as whitepapers, reports, and articles. 

Once this content is crafted, email marketing experts distribute it to subscribers effectively and measure its impact. 

For instance, PR tools can be used to conduct surveys and compile insightful reports. These reports can then be shared with audiences, driving subscribers to a website or landing page where they can engage further with a brand. 

By leveraging the synergy between PR and email marketing, businesses can create compelling content and ensure it reaches the right audience, driving engagement and fostering brand growth.

Affiliates and influencers

PR and email marketing are united when working with affiliates and influencers. Using email marketing smartly can turn influencers into a brand’s best friends. 

PR specialists should use the email marketing channel to lead automated and personalized communication with affiliates. It’s the easiest way to update affiliates about relevant product changes, new features, and customized reports concerning influencers’ income generated through affiliate marketing channels. 

Moreover, integrating email marketing with social media influencer campaigns via cross-promotion tactics can significantly amplify reach and engagement.

Incorporating mentions of social media influencer campaigns in email newsletters diversifies content and ensures that a business’s message resonates across different platforms. 

Conversely, highlighting email campaigns on social media can escalate email sign-ups, creating a symbiotic relationship that fosters a deeper connection with audiences.

Examples of public relations and email marketing working together

Let’s focus on real-life examples of PR and email marketing crafting marketing miracles together and gaining brand power through joint efforts.

Product launch email from Tracksmith

New product launches are always a big event for any business. Therefore, they should be made known to as large an audience as possible. This is where PR and email marketing come into play. 

Tracksmith created a separate PR email newsletter that offered a sneak peek and the opportunity to register for the launch of limited-edition shoes. This is an example of marketing cooperation by the book.

Source

charity: water’s brand story

One of the tasks of PR specialists is to resonate with audiences by sharing a brand’s story, ideals, aspirations, and goals. This is what the charitable company charity: water did through its email newsletter sent out before Giving Tuesday. The email shared with the audience charity: water’s first steps as a charity.

Source

Review request from reMarkable

To understand how a brand is doing in the eyes of the public, marketers should seek feedback from the audience’s own lips. Feedback and reviews from customers can inform the direction of future PR campaigns and help rectify mistakes.

reMarkable did a great job crafting an email featuring a full-fledged invitation to a feedback session for their truly remarkable tablet.

Source

Insert Coin’s collaboration with a famous brand 

Collaborations are one of the PR strategies that help increase brand visibility through joint events, promotions, and other activities with a more well-known brand, and email marketing is a good way to spread the news about an upcoming collaboration. 

This is exactly what the clothing brand Insert Coin did when collaborating with the popular game Call of Duty. The collaboration consisted not only of mutual advertising but also of the opportunity for customers to buy limited edition clothing related to the Call of Duty game series.

Source

Shopify’s webinar announcement email 

Combining PR and email marketing is highly effective in announcing events, product presentations, or demos. These events are ideal for showcasing the benefits of being part of a brand’s inner circle. 

PR generates buzz through press releases and media outreach, while email marketing delivers personalized invitations and exclusive offers directly to the target audience. Together, they maximize impact and drive engagement. Shopify has greatly amplified its brand by promoting its webinars through email newsletters.

Source

Wrapping up

As you can see, PR and email marketing are very closely related disciplines, and their synergy can help a business achieve greater marketing success. 

PR specialists not only design promotional strategies, events, and collaborations but also manage risks and influence public opinion, while email marketers are the blacksmiths who create impactful emails that effectively convey all the ideas developed by PR specialists to the masses.

Separately, they can achieve a lot, but together, they can achieve even more.